Laser-driven ion acceleration and activities at the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications

My group at the Chair for Medical Physics at the LMU Munich investigates the acceleration of ion bunches trough the interaction of laser pulses at relativistic intensities with plasmas. Our main objective is to realize viable sources for applications in radiation physics, chemistry, biology and medicine. Currently, we establish the Centre for Advanced Laser Applications (CALA), which will feature a laser system able to provide 20 fs short laser pulses with peak power of up to 3 Peta-Watt. The difficulty of advancing laser-driven ion acceleration into integrated laser-driven ion acceleration systems (ILDIAS) mainly originates from the fact that in the focus of a PW-laser pulse, the light intensities rise from the damage threshold of solid matter (~1013W/cm²) via relativistic intensities (1018W/cm²) to the maximum intensity (1020…1022W/cm²) within a few 10s of picoseconds. I will explain a single shot, time resolved optical probing technique that we have recently demonstrated to yield time resolved intensity contours (TRIC, [1]). Similarly, the accelerated proton bunches reach high energy density when refocused onto an object. By measuring the ultrasound signal that emerges from the volume of energy deposition we can reconstruct the dose distribution of a single proton bunch and hence determine the Ion-Bunch Energy by Acoustic Tracing (I-BEAT, [2]). The dynamics between TRIC and I-BEAT reach from sub-picosecond (laser-induced) to microsecond scale (ion-bunch induced) and shed light on fascinating opportunities in future studies. [1] Haffa D, Temporally Resolved Intensity Contouring (TRIC) for characterization of the absolute spatio-temporal intensity distribution of a relativistic, femtosecond laser pulse, Sci Rep 9 (2019) 7697. [2] Haffa et al, I-BEAT: Ultrasonic method for online measurement of the energy distribution of a single ion bunch, Sci Rep 9 (2019) 6714.